Category: City of Heroes/Villains

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Issue 15

You can start the new Strike Force with a team of 4. It may even be possible to complete it with that, if you have the right characters and no PUG members. It is not much fun, it is bugged, and it is not the kind of thing you can do with whatever random people who happen to recruit. This puts it with a small amount of the level 50 content, like the Statesman TF, Lord Recluse SF, and Hami.

I’d say more, and there is more to the Issue, but I don’t care at this point. I’ll wait a little longer before uninstalling City of Heroes.

The thread discussing it is interesting, if only for the way that games’ urban legends get made. You can see people discussing how to get something to work and what worked for them, even after the developer has posted and said it doesn’t work. And heck, the developer could even be wrong. It has happened before.

: Zubon

Learning Curves on the Shooting Range

My wife hesitates to try cooperative multi-player games because she does want groups depending on her to do something she does not know how to do. If your tank does not know her job, you wipe. If this is your crowd controller’s first time in a complicated fight, you may be in serious trouble. This worked fine in City of Heroes: not only could she solo for almost everything, but when she did group, she was a Scrapper who did not care about dying. There are very few cases in CoH where anyone cares if the Scrapper dies or has less than the perfect DPS setup.

As I am learning Team Fortress 2, I see that, but there is another factor: many of the people shooting me already know what to do. There are nine classes to learn, most with some special feature, six of whom have three additional options for their equipment; there are also all the maps to learn, some with multiple stages, all with their scattered refills, control points, backdoors, ambush spots, ramps, etc. While you are trying to get the swing of all this, one guy is lobbing pipe bombs at you, and you will be shot in the head in you pause in a sniper’s field of vision.

Some things are more intuitive than others. Protect this point, check. Move the cart along that line, check. And then you find that the map has multiple vertical levels, a little room with ammo and health, back stairs that everyone else on your team seems to know, and windows that you may or may not be able to shoot through. While someone with a flamethrower is leaping around the corner at you.

One of the great barriers for PvP games is that they are not newbie friendly. If veteran players are alongside green recruits, that is great for training the new guys and integrating them, and horrible for having their first night of play involve being shot in the head twenty times by guys they never saw. TF2 is kind enough to give you a picture of your killer, so you can see where those snipers are after someone kills you.

: Zubon

Player Respawn Timers

Most death penalties come down to lost time, in its various incarnations of lost experience points, item repairs, corpse runs, and debuffs. As death penalties become increasingly light, one type almost invariably remains: you wasted the time you spent failing, and now you need to run back to continue. (If you die in a group, you may just sit out a while until rezzed, hoping your group does not wipe at -1 member, or a shorter time with -2 members during the rez.)

This time-to-return can be very important. If it is very short, and the death penalty is otherwise small, you zerg things: just keep dying and coming back until you get through it. It is a measure of how far we have gotten past meatspace that we can now intuitively see solutions that include “die and come back” as part of viable plans. To take the first few examples that come to mind: our LotRO static group wiped on an overpull with adds last week, but ran back to clear it easily since we had taken out 75% of the enemies on the first try; LotRO three-man instances are short enough for people to die and come back while someone keeps the boss from resetting, and some turtle-raiding strategies involve planned deaths to reset the stacking DoTs; fights against CoX archvillains and giant monsters often involve multiple resurrections and hospital runs/teleports, and the Hamidon raid usually involves planned near-wipes.

This is usually not a good thing for the game. Continue reading Player Respawn Timers

City of Heroes vs. Farming

After adding more than 100 Architect badges in Issue 14, Paragon Studios has decided that 80% of them were bad ideas. There is good and bad in that.

Good: “So, going forward—beginning with the Mission Architect badges—we’ve decided to move away from ‘count’ badges that might encourage farming and/or aberrant game play. Instead, we’d like to encourage players to try all of our content by offering badges for completing 1 time accomplishments and achievements.” Existing “kill 100 rats” badges will remain, although I guess we’ll see if they tone down the count requirements in the future.

Bad: “We really didn’t want the Mission Architect to be an environment that encourages farming for XP, Rewards or Badges…” Not bad as such, but again, they seem not to have thought that through. Seriously, you did not see how it might encourage those? Let’s take the last part: you did not want Architect missions farmed for badges? There is a badge for defeating 5,000 custom enemies in Architect missions and 50,000 enemies in test mode. Let me say that one again: 50,000 enemies, in the “no xp” test mode, and they did not want to encourage farming. There is one for earning 25,000 tickets and another for going 1,000 over your ticket cap, one for 10,000 in test mode, then another for 1,000 inspirations. Or more simply: 100 player-made arcs, 100 heroic arcs, 100 villainous arcs, 100 Developer’s Choice arcs, 250 Hall of Fame arcs, and 100 arcs in test mode. No farming intended, just hundreds of story arcs?

When your new release is more than half a year in the making, because remember it was originally intended for Issue 13, you need to at some point resolve diverging views like “reduce farming,” “require 50,000 kills,” and “give players easy ways to make lots of experience.”

: Zubon

Make Them All Giant Monsters

Yesterday’s comments prompted a weird proposal: remove enemy levels entirely.

For those of you who do not know City of Heroes’ giant monster code, they treat all characters as even-level. You should have the same chance to hit (and debuff effect, armor, etc.) as everyone else, and you receive level-appropriate damage; I think damage does not scale perfectly, because higher-level characters seem to do a lot more even after taking into account higher level enhancements, and healing is still level-appropriate so level 1s do jack for level 50s.

What happens if you apply something like this to every single enemy in the game? You can still have levels, when you get new skills and improvements to them, but they are equally effective against every enemy in the game (modulo resistances). You can still have higher-con enemies, but they will be orange to everyone.

Continue reading Make Them All Giant Monsters

When Bigger is Better

One function of levels is to spread and pace content, and to guide you through it. If you have an epic tale spread across 1000 quests, you can make a game with 50 levels and have each award 5% of a level. The earlier parts will have simpler gameplay, the middle ones can transition to using skills more strategically, and hopefully you avoid making the ending “difficult” by pumping up the numbers.

Some players in The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ have been complaining about leveling too quickly. If you stack rested experience with recent bonuses and the new leveling curve, you move through some levels very quickly. If you want a quest to be challenging, you need to plan on hitting it soon, because you will outlevel it within the week, at which point it is green and gray content. Mowing through grays can get boring.

City of Heroes, however, lets you keep almost all the content challenging no matter what level you are. Content is instanced, and levels scale. If you missed a story arc, hit Ouroboros and flash back to it; set your level lower with Ouroboros to make non-instance content challenging for your (new) level. You can exemplar down to play with friends, and task forces do that automatically. In the other direction, you can sidekick up, and Mission Architect can be rigged to auto-sidekick everyone. There is very little you can do at level 5 that you cannot do at level 50, and almost none of it is interesting.

Farming, powerleveling? Unlike many games, it will not hurt your City of Heroes character or make you miss content. You can always go back and do it, without its being trivialized. You can skip the entire game, but that just means you have the entire game as a menu before you, rather than whatever 10% is available at your level. Higher levels mean more content options, not just different ones, and you do not lose the old options.

Once again, I wish more games would learn the lessons that City of Heroes has been teaching for five years.

: Zubon

Hypothesis

The City of Heroes power Super Jump is a more entertaining method of travel than anything in any other game.

Competing claim: Inertial Reduction is an area effect Super Jump, letting everyone bounce like Gummi Bears, but that awesomeness is mitigated by its having a minute-long duration and requiring re-application.

: Zubon

Fast Leveling in Older Games

Bug or feature?

Many games with expansion packs have started speeding their players to the end, so that they can be where all the other players are (and need to buy the expansion pack to advance). WoW does this most visibly, even before having you invite friends for triple xp and zebra love. The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ made the early levels faster and started running nigh-continuous bonus xp weekends, weeks, and months.

City of Heroes may have done this with Mission Architect. Farming is more or less constant. You can pick the enemy best optimized for your character or make your own perfect foe. Grab friends, smash, repeat. A single run through a good farm will get you to level 20. This differs from normal powerleveling because Architect can be set up to auto-sidekick everyone to the same level range. You no longer need bridges, care in mission selection, or anything: pick your ideal enemy, fill a mission with copies of that one guy, and smash. If that is too hard, add pets that will increase your defenses.

City of Heroes, however, has no endgame. There are a few hard things to do at 50, but mostly you can just keep running missions. A variety of tools let you do pretty much anything at 50 that you could earlier, so it is always better to be higher level, but it is not as though you are raiding or something. Getting to 50 means being 50, maybe farming for those purples.

City of Heroes is, however again, very alt-friendly, complete with sales of extra character slots of more alts. Want to try a new character? Bam, level 20 in an hour, try a dozen new powers. Out of character slots? Bam, $20, 5 more. If people are racing to the level cap and re-rolling, that can only mean more money. Or they quit, but your most competent power-levelers are long-term players who came to peace with the lack of endgame years ago.

: Zubon

Most Technically Difficult Bug Ever

Players occasionally say absurd things like, “It would take five minutes to fix this little bug.” Which, if it were true, would probably have already been done. My new favorite example for either “wow, this must be way harder than it looks” or “wow, they really don’t care” is the color-change bug for City of Heroes global chat.

Global chat, by the way, is one of those great features that every game should have, along with global friends. CoH is packed with features every game should have, especially given that CoH has had most of those features for at least four years, if not since launch five years ago. Global chat lets you set a cross-server channel, so you can talk on any of your characters, on any server, across instances, time, space, whatever.

Way back eleven months ago, I listed this as one of my favorite new bugs introduced. They let players set chat channel colors, only instead of working, it randomized chat channel colors every time you zoned. Unless you are on a long mission, you zone constantly in City of Heroes: into your base, across the city, in and out of buildings, in and out of missions.

City of Heroes is once again inviting players back to see the new stuff, while this bug still exists. Every player who uses global channels, which is everyone in the slightest contact with the community, will see this bug moments after they log in, and it will recur and make itself known every time they zone. If they zone quickly with an active chat channel, the same channel will appear in a rainbow of colors as it picks a new one with each zoning.

This must be the meanest bug ever seen. I cannot imagine a company willingly leaving something that visible, even if that minor, in the game for a year.

: Zubon

Openings, Good and Bad

Your MMO must convince me that it is worth playing in less time than it takes me to download the next one. If your tutorial/introduction does not include heavy doses of awesome, soon, you will not be getting my credit card information. If you cannot bother to make the game look good in the one bit that you know every single player will see, I must assume that the rest of the game is worse.

Warhammer does this very well. Tutorial? More or less none; proceed straight to the war. You start on a battlefield. I started as a Greenskin, which is probably why I bought the game. Take a few steps forward from the log-in spot, and you can see dwarves attacking. The Dwarf area is much the same, with squigs and goblins running around the cave next door and giant cannons pointed at the enemy. NPCs are blasting each other in case you did not get the idea. The elf pairing has the gentlest, and therefore worst, introduction. Your starting spot feels safe, and your first enemies are tiny fairies. Even there, you have attacking forces 10 seconds away, and the good guys get to shoot down harpies with a ballista. Win.

The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ does this pretty well. The opening is pretty tame, but it immediately tosses in the things you want from Lord of the Rings. If you are a hobbit, you immediately see a Black Rider. Dwarves start next to Gandalf in a scene referenced in The Hobbit, and they proceed to a troll fight. Elves get a troll too, and humans and elves both start with the world burning down around them. It is not a great, action-packed intro, but it gives you the setting while you get your bearings.

City of Heroes is a mixed bag. Outbreak is very weak, notably the “run in a straight line” bits. Breakout is better, with a more interesting map and a mass NPC slugfest. The real awesomeness of City of Heroes, however, is the costume designer. Even before you put your character in the world, you pick from a mess of powers, see the cool toys that lie in wait, and then probably spend a ridiculous amount of time playing with paper dolls. That kind of thing makes the slow start of actual gameplay tolerable.

Many other games do it badly. I don’t even bother to mention most that I try. They were not worth the time to download, even if I downloaded while I slept. That thread has a bit of hate for Age of Conan, but they had the presence of mind to make the 1-20 game one of the most celebrated bits of content around.

: Zubon

Anyone want to comment on WoW’s opening? I tried a few way back in beta. The Undead was the most impressive. Dwarves were kind of meh.